Health Care’s Mental Health Crisis: Winning the Battle in the Mind

There’s a mental health crisis among health care professionals. No sector of health care has been spared. Physician suicide rates are at an all-time high and hospitals are forming committees to decide what to do about it, but none of the interventions seem to be working very well.

I confess I was feeling the strain when I went to lunch with my son and one of his military buddies. My son’s friend is originally from Afghanistan and served as a translator for the Army Rangers when he was only a teenager. He’s now a U.S. citizen and is serving in the U.S. Army, but the harrowing story of his young life in a war zone kept me on the edge of my seat.

When he came to this country alone at 17, he didn’t understand that the nickname some people used to address him by was intended as a slur. He took it as a compliment and was friendly in response. His positive attitude won everyone over. He earned a college degree and is now happy, content, and well-accepted in his new hometown—because he started with a great attitude. Although he’s seen horrors that are beyond the imagining of most of us, his outlook on life is sunny. He’s grateful for his blessings and has no self-pity about his past trauma.

That encounter got me thinking about resilience and the power of a positive attitude. My late father is another good example. Born in 1917, he went hungry as a child during the Depression, spent all of WWII in hard combat in the South Pacific sick with malaria, endured the long winter retreat of the Korean War, and was a Soviet expert at the Pentagon during the most harrowing years of the Cold War. It’s fair to say that the first 50 years of his life kept going from bad to worse. Nevertheless, he was an optimistic, positive person.

I have often wondered if my Dad’s ability to endure hardship as an adult was in part due to his difficult childhood. He and my son’s Afghani buddy had to be resilient just to survive childhood. But there’s something else that they have in common. They decided to be happy regardless of circumstances.

The checkout counter at the grocery store is lined with magazines featuring rich and famous people who are also famously unhappy. Yet, I have a patient who is paralyzed from the neck down who is so cheerful that I feel better after I’ve seen him. Every day he makes a choice to be cheerful, and I am sure that it is not easy. The patients we most enjoy caring for are the ones who endure their awful diseases with grace and a positive attitude. They are inspiring. The patients we secretly dread to see are the ones who complain constantly and are never satisfied, no matter how much we do for them.

No matter how grim the situation was, my Dad never said, “I just can’t stand this.” He always said, “I can do this,” or, “We will get through this.” Soldiers know that all battles are first won or lost in the mind. It’s not a change in circumstances that we need most—it’s a change in attitude. Every day I get to help people with chronic wounds feel better. What a great job that is! And despite the disasters that have befallen the world, we have much to be grateful for.

We can improve our mental health by changing the talk track in our head. I won’t say, “I can’t take this much longer.” Instead, I will say, “This won’t last forever, I will get through this.” I will wake up every day and count my blessings. I will be grateful to attend the Fall SAWC in person, regardless of the restrictions, and I will stop telling myself how much I hate wearing a mask. Instead, I will tell myself that I’m glad to see you even if I only see your eyes.

We can’t control circumstances, but we can control how we react to them. The battle we have to win is the one in our mind.

Caroline E. Fife is Chief Medical Officer at Intellicure Inc., The Woodlands, TX; executive director of the U.S. Wound Registry; medical director of St. Luke’s Wound Clinic, The Woodlands; and co-chair of the Alliance of Wound Care Stakeholders.

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